New Guinea Martyrs' Day Observance

I am with you to save you and rescue you.
Can anything cut us off from the love of Christ?
I shall draw all people to myself.

Great words. This day, New Guinea Martyrs' Day, is a great day, perhaps the
greatest of all days for our proud corner of the Anglican Church. It is
also, and in its true sense, an awe-ful day. A day to fill us with awe, awe
for our God, and awe for what our sisters and brothers in faith can both
suffer for and achieve through our God.
It is a day for us to look both back in time and forward, meditating on our
own sacrifices, our own commitment, as individuals and as a church.

I shall get to that still shocking time in 1942. But first to the present.

The people of Papua New Guinea have just gone through a traumatic election
that cost 30 lives. In The Highlands, the country's most populous region,
about 1 million adults live but almost 2 million votes were cast. In the
Southern Highlands, the hapless wife of a polling official was shot dead
when she opened the door of her home to a gang looking to hijack ballot
papers. Most of the elections there were ruled invalid. This is the
wealthiest province of the country, PNG's Texas, its oil and gas field. Yet
it is today ruled by warlords who control armed mercenaries who operate
machine guns from armour-plated, converted utes.

Shortly before the election, Roman Catholic women of the Southern Highlands
met to issue this heartfelt appeal for peace: "We live in constant fear.
There is No Law and Order in the province. The roads are dangerous to
travel, homes have been ransacked, there are many killings, numerous rapes,
break and entries, torturings, threats, kidnappings. Our children are
infected by this virus. Our peaceful town and home province has turned into
an evil place. It is a cancer that is effectively destroying our province
quicker and more devastatingly than the epidemic of Aids."

"Mipela i salim bikpela sori" (We offer up our grief) concludes Grace Sui, president of the Catholic Women's Association. "Mipela i pre bai God i ken givim yumi belisi long dispela taim nogut." (We pray that God may send us peace and deliver us from this evil time)

Such prayers can be and are answered by God  but generally through His
human agents. Who will be that agent for Grace's prayer? Who will step up to
help her and her fellow mothers, wives and daughters gain bel isi, peace?
Yes, Grace will be hoping to be helped by her fellow countrymen and women,
the new Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare and his quite impressive team  yet another "last, best hope" to avoid collapse.

But who else can she look to  who, in our globalising world? By far the
biggest role that Australians can play internationally is in the Pacific
island region which we dominate. It remains however a role that Australia
tends to shun  partly because of a concern about the tyranny of size that
is as crippling as the tyranny of distance about which Geoffrey Blainey
wrote. Just as we feel marginalised by our comparatively small population
when relating to Asia, so we tend to feel anxious about appearing Big
Brother to our island neighbours. Many in the islands however, who despair
of the corruption of their own tiny elites, wish that Australians would
express an appetite for a bigger role.

Almost all of the island countries, whose populations like people everywhere
aspire to improved living standards, are instead witnessing the reverse:
population growth outstripping economic growth, rainforests and fish stocks
being plundered, living standards in decline, unlike even the poorest
nations in neighbouring Asia.

In PNG, a journalist friend of mine earlier this year interviewed Grace
Murua, a young woman from Tufi, an Anglican, who is teaching at a government
primary school up in the Managalas mountains in her home Oro province, still
unconnected by main road. The parents there do all they can to help, but
Grace and a male colleague are the only teachers for all 400 children in the
school. She met my friend in Port Moresby where she had gone to try to get
paid after two months with no wages. She was concerned about this, and about
the capacity of the two teachers to meet the children's full needs. But she
remained otherwise bright and enthusiastic. She said: "The children are a
pleasure to teach because they are so willing to learn. We can grow fresh
food. We have plenty of rivers to wash in, and planes come once a week." Try
mentally transposing that situation to country Victoria today.

Solomon Islands is in anguish following its coup of June 2000, which shows
no sign of abating, as you know well at St Peter's through your own
wonderful support for Father Sam Ata, his wife Doreen and their family. Last
week an Anglican priest, Father David Augustine Quve, the Minister for Youth
and Women's Affairs, was shot dead. The Roman Catholic bishop of Western
Solomons, Bernard O'Grady, an Australian Dominican, told me a few weeks ago
of the breakdown of trust. People no longer looked you in the eye as they
passed, he said; a shocking condition, for anyone who has lived in or even
travelled in Melanesia, whose people are such naturally gracious hosts. As
in the Southern Highlands, automatic weapons remain the passport to control
in the community. The Solomons economy contracted 18 per cent in 2000 and 15
per cent in 2001. Teachers and hospital workers are not being paid. John
Roughan, a former missionary brother from Australia who is a leading
community activist there, says: "The reasoning behind the coup was to
control the political process more easily and fully access money. Politics
has become the economy." Priests are also dying in PNG. Two much loved Roman
Catholic missionary priests have been killed there during the last year, as
was a Lutheran pastor from the Highlands as he ministered to a family in
Port Moresby.

To stress: The Pacific islands is the only part of the world where Australia
is the dominant player, alongside New Zealand. This has become doubly so
since the end of the Cold War, after which the major powers effectively quit
the region. Pacific islanders know Australia well. They eat Vegemite, some
of them play Aussie Rules; more play rugby, both codes. They like
Australians. And they are overwhelmingly committed churchgoers, though as
anywhere they are not immune from the hijacking of religion for gain. Bill
Skate, today the Speaker of PNG's Parliament and clearly its worst Prime
Minister some time before that, recently made one of his regular emotional
appearances on the platform of one of the growing number of high-powered,
itinerant American pentecostalist preachers who attract huge audiences when
they tour PNG. Skate said that night, to people who shortly afterwards
re-elected him: "They think I am one of the most corrupt politicians in the
South Pacific, but I can tell you that I am not. I have been made righteous
by my Lord Jesus." Amen.

The majority of the populations of the Melanesian countries closest to
Australia  PNG, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu  are either Anglicans or Roman Catholics. It is their membership of a world-wide religion that does most to overcome their sense of remoteness and isolation; how is that sense of
membership affirmed and reciprocated?... I suggest that the world, even the
Anglican and Roman Catholic world, knows and cares  the two actions are
intimately related  distressingly little of what its Melanesian brothers
and sisters must face, and do achieve. The militias that fought over Honiara
airport, Henderson's Field, were kept apart for days by the incredible
bravery of Melanesian Brothers, an indigenous Anglican order. The courageous
group of citizens for democracy who gathered throughout the Fiji coup of two
years ago to pray and campaign for peace was led by church people and met daily at the Anglican cathedral in Suva. Those martyrs of 1942 included, of course, two Papua New Guineans.

The Anglican Church of PNG has been tested again in the dark days of crime,
corruption and the collapse of living standards over the last decade or
more, to a degree than might almost be compared with the challenges under
Japan. Less black and white, but as debilitating. And it has come through
that challenge, as have the other major churches, which are now viewed by
the ordinary people of the country as their last great hope and source of
continuing schooling and health care even as the government services have
collapsed.

The Anglican Archbishop of PNG, James Ayong alongside whom I once worked when we were both laymen employed by the archdiocese, as was Tevita Talanoa, now Bishop of Dogura  issued an Easter message last year, in which he noted that our gospel writer, John, was living "among a people already beginning to experience persecution." The Archbishop writes: "John knew that God moves most powerfully in the human situations that seem most hopeless: we know
that the moment of danger is a holy moment, a moment over which the Spirit
hovers lovingly. If we do not share the pain of worldly failure when it
comes to one part of our nation, if we abandon one another, we lose the gift
of paradox, which is God's primary way of interacting with the human
condition. We cannot know the risen Christ if we shrink from the crucified
Christ." How apt for us too. What if we abandon not one part of our nation
but a prominent part of our neighbourhood?

PNG is by far the biggest field of endeavour for AusAID, and for some of our
non government aid agencies. Our Federal Government's most senior Ministers
meet annually with their PNG counterparts. Many of our most senior
businesspeople remain extraordinarily well informed about PNG.

And what of our own church?

The era of decolonisation and postmodernism appears to have had one of its
greatest and more lasting impacts on those elements of Australia's churches,
including sections of our Anglican church, that had become lured by the
diverting idol of secular "relevance". Oddly, during this confused period in
the latter part of the last century, the voices of those in developing
countries were not heard any louder; indeed, they were sometimes drowned out
by those in the wealthier lands like Australia who claimed to speak for
them, and to be carping on their behalf about the very concept of mission.

It is long overdue for us to put these cul de sacs and false steps behind,
and to offer a true Pacific Solution. Africa yes, continues to suffer its
unspeakable tragedies, and if we have the resources to help people suffering
everywhere so we should. But I suggest that our linked history, geography,
and faith with the islands and especially PNG and Solomon Islands, should
compel our most immediate attention, prayers, alms; and, yes, mission,
acting of course in all directions at once.

It is time for us, especially this day, to honour, unequivocally, the noble
goals of mission and of missionaries.

I invite you all to look again today at Napier Waller's wonderful window,
dedicated in October 1946. Its conception, that of Canon Maynard, was to
depict beauty, truth and goodness  attributes of God Himself  as revealed
in the church of PNG. The beauty of nature, of innocent children learning
truths from a missionary teacher  the window honours especially and
appropriately the women who have always played a leading role in the PNG
church. The beauty of the cathedral church of St Peter and St Paul, Dogura
at its consecration, the truth expressed in the words of that service, the
goodness of God in the sacraments, with the priest clothed in purple at the
altar because, as Bishop Philip Strong said in preaching here 21 years ago
today, "it is through suffering that we enter into glory and triumph."
Bishop Philip was of course the leader of the church in PNG at that fateful
hour in 1942 when the missionaries responded to his call for them to stay at
their posts. We see evil, today as then, attacking but failing to conquer
beauty, truth and goodness. And, of course, we see everywhere: sacrifice.

This is a quality that is quite opposed to the dominant spirit of our age.
On my way to work from Flinders Street Station every day, I pass a little
fly-poster with which I have some sympathy. It shows a hand plunging a
television set into a large bowl full of water, and says below: "Enough.
Build Your Own Reality." But no. We can't. A reality already exists, one we
must acknowledge, even if it is one that we must struggle to change. Ours is
an age of self-centredness, of self-deception, of "empowerment", of
"self-realisation." Yet what passion, what life, we miss if these
narcissistic goals consume us. There can be few more thrilling yet awe-ful
letters than that written by the young Father Vivian Redlich, the last
letter he wrote, addressed to his father from "somewhere in the Papuan
jungle" where he had remained to look after his Papuan flock, and to be with
his new fiance, the nurse May Hayman. Bishop Philip described Fr Vivian as
"that happy, youthful, gifted, gallant soul." My former boss Bishop David
Hand offered himself as a replacement for Fr Vivian, who was cruelly killed
as the Japanese advanced. Can we not even consider ways to meet the great
challenge of our neighbourhood today, to lobby our church and government
leaders, to act ourselves, in the search for a true Pacific solution?

New Guinea Martyrs' Day has been faithfully observed here at St Peter's for
54 years now. Its message is clearly an enduring one, that goes out from and
far beyond those martyrs. It is that sacrifice made with a pure heart is
never in vain. Unless a wheat grain falls into the earth and dies, it
remains only a single grain.

The other side of the coin from sacrifice is incorporation, gathering
together into the life of the church, into the life of God. I am with you to
save you. There are many here this morning who can testify that the material
poverty of living as a missionary in PNG meant little to them in contrast
with the richness, the fun, the joy, the loss of self, in daily life, in
brotherhood and sisterhood, in true mutual acceptance.

Finally, we are sure that Our Lord knows this because he lived it all
Himself. And died. And rose. He expects us to do nothing he did not do
himself first. He too, because he was fully human, wavered for a while,
standing at the brink. In our gospel this morning, Jesus is speaking just
after entering Jerusalem for the last time, on a donkey, to shouts of
Hosanna! But Our Lord alone hears the ominous relentless drumming leading to
the shockingly close climax. "Now my soul is troubled," he says, in a
passage that echoes the scene in the garden of Gethsemane in the other
gospels. When Jesus asks: "What shall I say: Father, save me from this
hour?" this is no rhetorical question. The answer seems for a time in
genuine contention, as in the scene set in the garden  Jesus' comrades
sleep in exhaustion beside him. But then he sets his face and his feet again
towards "the very reason that I have come to this hour." Our Lord surely
knows well the meaning of sacrifice. Can anything cut us off from the love
of Christ? Unshakeably, no.

Almighty God, there is no greater love than to give our lives for you, and
for our friends. Grant us the courage to make our own sacrifices. And may
we, in the company of your martyrs, gaze with joy upon the face of Christ.